Media Priming and Racialized Production Decisions in College Football Broadcasts *: Extrapolating Strategies for Analyzing Video Data

In this chapter, the authors reflect on the process of analyzing 118 hours of video broadcast footage for their 2020 article “Invincible Bodies: American Sport Media’s Racialization of Black and White College Football Players,” published in International Review for the Sociology of Sport. By analyzing several aspects of the video broadcasts, their findings captured the insidious ways in which sport media reinforces the dehumanization of Black people. They explain the analytical processes they engaged in to analyze such a large dataset and methodological decisions they made, given the nuances within and complexity of the data. Analyzing the various layers of data (e.g., visuals, commentary, tone and intonation, and production decisions) added nuance that would have been rendered invisible had they conducted analysis using transcriptions alone. They also detail how the use of the cloud-based qualitative data analysis application, Dedoose, enabled them to directly code the video data and use the constant comparative method in a dynamic way that elicited rich findings.